Explanation: This composite of images spaced a weather-permitting 5 to 9 days apart, from 2024 September 19 (top right) through 2025 May 18 (bottom left), faithfully traces ruddy-colored Mars as it makes a clockwise loop through the constellations Gemini and Cancer in planet Earth's night sky. You can connect the dots and dates with your cursor over the image, but be sure to check out this animation of the Red Planet's 2024/25 retrograde motion. Of course Mars didn't actually reverse the direction of its orbit. Instead, the apparent backwards motion with respect to the background stars is a reflection of the orbital motion of Earth itself. Retrograde motion can be seen each time Earth overtakes and laps planets orbiting farther from the Sun, the Earth moving more rapidly through its own relatively close-in orbit. In this case Mars' apparent eastward motion began to reverse around December 8, when it seemed to linger near open star cluster M44 in Cancer. After wandering back to the west, under Gemini's bright stars Castor and Pollux, Mars returned to pose near M44 by early May. At its brightest near opposition on 2025 January 16, Mars was a mere 96 million kilometers away.
Now Class…can you tell me why all the planets appear to go backward (retrograde) on occasion?
One Reply to “Mars In The Loop”
When I go to bed at night, Mars has been glaring red outside my bedroom window distracting me. I was going to write a blog post about it on May 20th, and took a screenshot of my StarWalk screen for the post. But THEN I decided to wait until Mars disappeared from my window so I could blog about how happy I was that it's finally gone. But here you are… getting to it first! You need to go back to posting naked dudes so I don't get accused of blog theft! https://www.blogography.com/photos87/BlogTheft.jpg
When I go to bed at night, Mars has been glaring red outside my bedroom window distracting me. I was going to write a blog post about it on May 20th, and took a screenshot of my StarWalk screen for the post. But THEN I decided to wait until Mars disappeared from my window so I could blog about how happy I was that it's finally gone. But here you are… getting to it first! You need to go back to posting naked dudes so I don't get accused of blog theft! https://www.blogography.com/photos87/BlogTheft.jpg